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Monthly Archives: January 2017

Unilingual Anglophones in Canada often despair of their inability to speak French, but may not realize that a healthy portion of the words they commonlyuse in everyday parlance come from French. A text written in French would indeed be more intelligible to any hopelessly unilingual Anglophone than anything written in Old English.

This heavy influx of French into the English has nothing to do with the bilingualnature English/French of Canada, but can be sourced to the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066 and to the ensuing Norman rule of the British Isles for nearly 200 years during which Normandy (that part of France where the Normans came from) and England were united under one ruler. French became the language of the administration, of the nobility and of the courts. In addition, French enjoys a healthy presence in everything that has to do with home furnishing, food, fashion and luxury (surprised?).

So, what are the French words commonlyused in English?

Let us start with politics: govern, parliament, administer, court are all French words.

While it will surprise nobody that English borrowed ample words from French for food, food deserves a paragraph by itself, for it denotes the socialrelationship that existed between the English peasantry (who spoke English) and the French cooks exercising their trade in high socialcircles.

There is an interestingcoupling of English and French words when talking about animalsdepending on whether the animal is on the field or ready to be consumed.